Orange is for two....green is for one.

Times they are a turbulent.  In every way.  Our building project has us swinging on both sides of the emotional scale; one minute jubilant with ideas and the next crushed with the reality of the mounting costs.  The winter storms have been in full turbulent swing, helping the demolition on with sheets of metal and plastic roofing flying off at high speed and landing in adjacent fields. Our sheep are expectant, fully rotund and due to lamb at the end of the month.

We are currently in a stage of re-design with our building project.  The design doesn't fit the budget.  Either that or we throw more money at it.  The danger of 'value engineering' is that the quality can be compromised.  It is a fine line between cuttings costs and down spec'ing.  All the time being aware that we are beholden to an ecological timetable that gives us a short window of opportunity to get the farmhouse roof off, and back on again before May - when our lovely bats come home to roost.   

The Ologist, stickler for detail that he is, is quite right.  He won't start this project until all the costs are fixed, the plans are complete and we are sure we are ready.  We are itching to get going, and it would be easy to start the groundworks and demolition.  Only to find, due to a redesign, we may have excavated yards and yards of trenching in the wrong place.  So for now, we sit tight, until such times as we are ready. 



Scanning in progress

It is all about to take off in the barn.  The ponies have been evacuated from their winter stables and given another space to occupy, and the stable bays are now set up as our lambing shed.  A while ago we had all our ewes scanned to tell us how many lambs each ewe is carrying.  They have all been vaccinated prior to birthing which gives extra immunity to the lambs.  We have done our lambing course.  We just need to get our bio-security in place....and we're all set!  That's the theory anyway. 

When we received a call from a local farmer who's helped us no end in the past, explaining that his son was taking up from an old boy who was retiring from scanning we were thrilled.  He asked if they could come and scan our sheep, for free, on the condition that we keep all the results and give them feedback as to the accuracy of his scanning.  So one afternoon we gathered all the ewes in the barn and set up a race, heading for the scanning unit.  One by one they filed in.  The scanner called out his findings and if they were carrying twins I gave them an orange mark, a single was green, and an empty was left unmarked.  It was possibly the most exciting thing I've done since having a scan myself!  The information will be of most use when we bring the ewes in prior to lambing.  We will be able to separate the singles from the doubles and we give different feed amounts to each ewe depending on her needs. 

Our first flock have 4 twins due and the rest are singles.  Compared to the sheep farmers around us this is peanuts, but as its our first ever lambing we're quite happy to only have a few twins to manage and thankfully there are no triplets.  I know scanning isn't an exact art but it will give us a good indication of what to expect. 

The early part of the year saw us hiring a huge chipper.  It was a monster; a diesel engine, tracked forestry chipper - and very satisfying it was too.  We topped out a line of trees and chipped all the arisings.  That's whole tree trunks being fed into a machine that spits out what ever size chippings you desire.

We must have made ourselves over 20 tonnes of wood chip from the beech, oak and ash trees we hard pruned.  It has been piled into bays and I am starting to spread this round the garden beds slowly.  It is invaluable material for me and quite expensive to buy in.  . 

This organic mulch will significantly reduce weeds and slowly improve the soil condition as it starts to rot down.  It will add much needed organic matter to the soil.  Apart from that it makes the beds look much tidier, and will reduce moisture loss over the summer let alone reducing my stress levels due to the lack of weeds appearing! 

Also in the garden we have replanted three large apple trees.  Using the digger makes easy work of uprooting a well established tree and replanting it.  There is no guarantee they will live, but they have two choices.  At least we have given them the best start with a good prune, lots of drainage and good strong stakes to keep them upright and reduce wind rock. 



Replanting a mature bramley

There are more fruit trees we have planted this week.  We bartered them with a neighbour who makes award winning cider from his own orchards.  He grafts his own trees and has swapped some of his two year apple saplings for several tonnes of firewood.  A very mutually beneficial barter.  We have a good selection from him; two Bramleys, four Ashmead's Kernel and four Egremont Russet.  The Ashmead's Kernel is a 17th Century English russet apple, its a good keeper and is noted for its distinctive pear like flavour.  The Egremont Russet is also an old English variety, its a good pollinator, and popular for its crisp flavour.    The Ologist thinks we will reposition the bee hive here therefore increasing pollination further.  Unfortunately, our rogue swarm we caught last summer didn't make it over the winter so we'll be on the lookout for another one this year and hopefully it will be a bigger and more robust swarm to survive.

It is exciting that we have finally moved into what will become our kitchen garden, and by planting up our orchard first it marks a significant start to this process.  We are planning to erect a polytunnel, fruit cage and field shelter, together with relocating the pig ark and chicken run.  This will then mean that we have in one paddock our chickens, pigs, vegetable growing and orchard.  This paddock is closer to the farmhouse and more convenient for us, and leaves room for the holiday homes to have their own private gardens and space away from our animals.   


2yr old sapling: Ashmead's Kernel

It is great to be able to design the space ourselves, and as we start the building project any cement pours that have excess cement will be used to make the foundations for the buildings here.  The trenching carrying electric, mains water and heating for the holiday homes will pass the kitchen garden paddock and we can spur off to take an electric and water feed into the paddock.  In fact anything I find that might be an offcut will no doubt be squirrelled into the kitchen garden.  I'm hoping to find some large diameter drainage pipes to grow my carrots in!

Once we are set up we'll be keen to get some more pigs - we just finished the last joint of pork at the weekend and our enormous chest freezer that was packed to the top with pork, sausages and bacon is thinning rapidly.  

It is a bit of a domino rally currently with this building project.  We are waiting patiently to get all our tiles in a row, evenly spaced and accurately measured.  We can't start one piece of the puzzle without all the others being in place.  And as we know with a well set up domino rally, once you hit that first tile, they race along at top speed gaining momentum till they reach the end with a huge finish!